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воскресенье, 8 марта 2015 г.

UNESCO calls destruction of ancient Iraq site ‘war crime’

The Islamic State group’s rampage
through the ancient city of Nimrud in northern Iraq is an act of “cultural
cleansing” that amounts to a war crime, and some of the site’s large statues
have already been trucked away for possible illicit trafficking, the head of
the U.N.’s cultural agency said Friday.

In an interview with The Associated
Press, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova described her angry reaction to
Thursday’s attack that came just a week after video showed Islamic State
militants with sledgehammers destroying ancient artifacts at a museum in Mosul.

“We call this cultural cleansing
because unfortunately, we see an acceleration of this destruction of heritage
as deliberate warfare,” Bokova said. She said the attack fit into a larger
“appalling vision” of persecution of minorities in the region and declared that
attacks on culture are now a security concern.

“It’s not a luxury anymore,” Bokova
said.

Later Friday, the spokesman for the
U.N. secretary-general said Ban Ki-moon condemned the attacks and said the
deliberate destruction “constitutes a war crime and represents an attack on
humanity as a whole.”

The Iraqi government says Islamic
State militants “bulldozed” the renowned archaeological site of the ancient
city in northern Iraq with heavy military vehicles on Thursday.

Bokova said U.N. officials have to
rely on satellite images of the destroyed city to assess the level of damage,
because the dangerous security situation makes it impossible to get people
close to the site.

But she said officials have seen
images of some of the large statues from the site “put on big trucks and we
don’t know where they are, possibly for illicit trafficking.”

Officials have seen photos of
destroyed symbols of the ancient kingdom of Assyria, with the head of a human
man and the body of a lion or eagle. She called them and other items at the
site priceless.

“The symbolism of this, they are in
some of the sacred texts even, in the Bible they are mentioned,” she said. “All
of this is an appalling and tragic act of human destruction.”

She said that before the attack,
UNESCO had been preparing to include Nimrud on its list of World Heritage
Sites. The city was the second capital of Assyria, a kingdom that began around
900 B.C. and became a great regional power. The discovery of treasures in the
city’s royal tombs in the 1980s is considered one of the 20th century’s most significant
archaeological finds.

The site lies just south of Iraq’s
second largest city, Mosul, which was captured by the Islamic State group in
June.

Bokova denounced the “cultural
chaos” and said she had alerted both Ban and the prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court.

She was meeting with Ban later
Friday and said she was sure of his support.

Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Mohamed
Alhakim, said Iraq had not yet formally asked for an emergency meeting of the
U.N. Security Council. He did not say what exactly Iraq wanted from the council
but warned of the looted treasures.

“Somebody is going to buy these,” he
said.

Bokova said she also plans to meet
with Interpol, major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York, major auction houses and Iraq’s neighbors in an attempt to stop the
illicit trafficking of items from the Nimrud site.

Bokova appealed in a statement
Friday to people around the world, especially young people, to protect “the
heritage of the whole of humanity.”

“I don’t see any justification, any
religious belief, any other kind of ambition, political or others, that justify
this kind of destruction,” she said.

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten
or redistributed.

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YOUTH PEACE PLAN OF GEORGIA

This publication is produced within the framework of the project - ‘‘Support Democratic Participation of Young Women in Building Peace and Stability in Georgia’’ implemented in Georgia by International Network for Civil Development - INCD in partnership with Young Women Experts’ Network for Peace and Security (YWEPS) and with the financial support of the Embassy of Canada through Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI).